“What’s for dinner?” Once you have kids, that question becomes part of your life. Even my mother-in-law, growing up in the 1930s, in the deep country in a large family as a child of a coal miner, remembers asking her mother, who would flatly respond, to which many of us can empathise, “Crickets and soot.”

Someday I want to make Crickets and Soot for dinner. Not a fancy Heston Blumenthal take on it, but literally…

Yesterday I decided to take my menu cue from this wonderful Carolina Chocolate Drops song and make… Cornbread and Butterbeans.

I liked the idea of a meal constructed differently, perhaps more simply, than the ones I often belabour– this one felt like a variation on Dal and Flatbreads, an easy, nutritious, cheap meal my children do enjoy.

What did I learn:

The Lima Bean of my American childhood is reborn in the dried Butterbean (in this case, a lazy tin) of my adulthood in the UK.

The “stew” I made with butterbeans was really good and simple and kind of universal: leeks, onion, carrot, celery sauteed in butter/ olive oil, the beans, some added liquid, salt and pepper and thyme and a bay leaf– and at the end lots of fresh parsley, which is still growing happily in this rainy but mild winter. The dish reminded me of the Marcella Hazan Italian recipe for a very garlicky white bean soup with loads of parsley. There’s a mildness to these beans and a slightly mealy texture that one child did end up rejecting, even as both of them continue to open up to new foods, thank goodness, because not being able to be fully creative in my cooking is tiresome.

Cornbread: I used some kefir in place of buttermilk. It was a bit on-the-edge and so sour that it instantly reacted to the baking soda/ bicarb in the recipe that it frothed over the jug. Because it was SO sour I decided to use the full amount of sugar in the recipe, in some attempt to please, i.e. not disgust, those same children as above. The result, having got in the habit of always reducing sugar in any recipe, was a taste way too sweet for my liking. And I used the duck eggs that I’d bought for the birthday cake that ended up being eggless. The cornbread tasted like cake to me, and not gritty. But still was fun to mop up the beans with it.

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I’m intrigued by your comment about the lima beans of your youth becoming the butterbeans of the U.K. Here in my community in southern Virginia we always called them butterbeans, never lima beans. In fact, until I was an adult and had moved away I wouldn’t have known what a lima bean was. So do I understand that in the U.K. they’re called butterbeans?

These days when the seeds arrive at the local feed store they’re packaged as “lima beans.” The manager told me that he’s had customers upset because they don’t sell butterbean seeds (not realizing that lima beans and butterbeans are one and the same).

I grew up in Philadelphia. On the internet all the American “butter bean” recipes were Southern. So I guess it’s a North/ South thing? The British love “butter beans” and they are often part of home cooking and one of the most common beans (next to Baked Beans) to find in tins. What I miss is the younger, green “Limas”– what do you call them Bill? Have never seen them in the UK. But: young broad beans (fava beans) might serve a similar function, though they do taste and behave differently….

My wife’s parents are from South Carolina and Alabama, but they called them lima beans. I think “butter beans” is a Southern thing, but not uniformly so.

I never liked butter beans when I was growing up. My mother was a “eat what’s on your plate” woman, but she told me that once she realized I genuinely didn’t like butter beans (as opposed to just preferring something else) she quit making me eat them. So I don’t know much about their taste and the varieties. We’ve never grown them here either, but they remain very popular around here.

We do grow “English peas,” which are green peas grown in the spring. That’s what they’ve always been called here and I recall that when we were in England we noticed that they seemed to be a popular part of children’s meals.

English peas are wonderful, and children in the UK do seem to eat a lot of them. Probably mostly from frozen. Somewhere there’s a Jane Grigson (if I remember correctly) piece on how the advent of the frozen pea took away the extreme specialness of eating fresh peas in that particular moment of summer…. I even remember my mother talking about shelling peas with her grandfather, who let her eat half of them raw and not worry about the dwindled harvest in the cooking pot. They must have been very fresh indeed to be so nice raw!

yum! How privileged your children are to be cooked such delights. I just can’t help thinking of Bagpuss when the mice pretend to make chocolate biscuits out of breadcrumbs and butterbeans, I don’t think this would wash wish your kids somehow but it’s a brilliant episode! x btw I was surprised your mother in law called grasshoppers crickets – isn’t that an American name?? xx

Hi Vicky. How interesting that Bagpuss recipe– let’s try that– maybe beans, cocoa powder, etc… I love using legumes in sweet baking– ie black bean brownies… it’s also a nice Japanese style thing (aduki beans, sweetened) —
Re the grasshopper/ cricket nomenclature thing– Yes! I thought that too…. But I did look it up and there are things in Britain referred to as crickets…. And my M-I-L’s mother was really very long ago and from another world and actually didn’t speak “English” as much as she did the “dialect” of The Forest of Dean, so maybe there’s some changed-in-translation in that tale coming down to me…. Soot is definitely a British concept LOL! (coal etc) xxx